Last week I went to my friend Senen's house to celebrate two things: 1) his dad's birthday, and 2) the anniversary of the "death" of Elvis. (C'mon, we all know that he's not really dead.) Senen had dressed up as Elvis for the occasion, and his dad was wearing a comfy T-shirt. Nice role reversal.

It was his dad's 71st birthday, I think. It was a funny and strange evening. A 48,000-hour DVD of like everything Elvis ever fucking did played on the TeeVee while we ate dinner. I happen to love everything that Elvis ever fucking did, so it was cool. Senen's dad told us he had once, on a journalistic assignment, spent 15 days in the Egyptian desert with no water. Then he passed around a black-and-white photo of him with Jayne Mansfield, but bragged to us that it was Marilyn Monroe. This wasn't senility. It was craftiness. He explained that he believed he could hook up with more girls if they thought Jayne was Marilyn. Sadly, they're not that easily confused.

Later, after 8 hours of Elvis, Senen's dad told him to turn down the volume on the TeeVee. "But dad, it's The King," Senen pleaded. "¡Es el más grande!" Senen's dad pretended to act unconvinced, but of course he knew that Elvis is indeed el más grande -- and that there's no higher, "Marilyn Monroe" level you can go to from there.

"Can you believe I'm going to be 71 years old?" he asked. "Don't I look great?" Indeed he did.

I went out onto the terrace. It was another beautiful summer night in Barcelona. We were way up on the top floor of the building and you could see all the weird little huts and shacks and water tanks on the rooftops of all the other buildings. It freaks me out to see all that stuff up there. I think, "Who's living in those things?"

I figure, it's a city, so somebody must be living in those spaces, just like New York has The Mole People living underground in the subway tunnels. Shit, if they don't wanna take advantage of it, I will. Something has to be going on with those rooftops. I am so fascinated with rooftops, I believe they deserve a special status as another one of the earth's surfaces, along with land, water, atmosphere, and concrete.

Metallica doing their "Morning Pages" with their "life coach" in Some Kind of Monster

August 20, 2005 - Metallica vs. The Ramones!
Oh, and I forgot to mention: I've seen the Metallica documentary that everyone's made fun of, Some Kind of Monster. Where they pay a "life coach" like $30,000 a month for group therapy so they can get back together and record a new album and tour. Of course, being the self-absorbed, teetotaling, art-collecting, multimillionaire yet still desperate jackasses they are, they tape all this and let us see it. Of course, we pay to see it, but still.

I like The Ramones better than Metallica. In fact, I don't even like Metallica. but I have to say that the Metallica documentary is a lot more fun than the Ramones documentary. That's even with me pulling out my hair and screaming, "I can't believe you guys! Oh my God, I'm so embarrassed for you, Metallica! I can't believe what I'm watching; I just wanna die! How could you, Metallica? How could you?" And like I said, I'm not a Metallica fan at all.
Why would I give two shits?

Oh, but Jesus, I do.

Sure, Metallica put themselves in the hands of a new-age, money-hungry soulshrinker. That was hard to deal with. But if The Ramones had hired the same guy, that guy would've killed himself. All that money wouldn't be worth it if he had to deal with those guys. That would be a trip to the Heart of Darkness.

And that would've been even more of a pain to watch.

An old bullfighting ring, gutted & turned into a shopping mall

August 19, 2005 - Johnny R's Inner Child, R.I.P.
This morning I went on a picture-taking mission. Just snapping pictures of everything as I walked through the steets. I ended up taking about 90 pictures. I love digital cameras!

Tonight during dinner watched a new documentary on the Ramones. Watched the whole thing to the end. It ended heavy because it went chronologically -- Joey dying from cancer, Dee Dee O.D.'s the Rock -n-Roll Hall of Fame ceremony where Johnny doesn't even mention the recently deceased Joey but thanks George Bush... The documentary basically just leaves you there. No moralizing commentaries on the shittiness of the Hall of Fame incident to make everything slightly better for the poor, emotionally drained viewer. Nope -- just like the way things happen in real life, it just leaves you cold.

I tell you, at the end of it all, I felt like I had cancer. Not just due to the frustration you felt for the band that they never got the success they wanted and deserved. Not just 'cause they had to watch other bands get wildly famous by copying their sound. Not just because you had to watch Dee Dee destroy himself with heroin and know that Joey and Johnny are both dead from cancer.

What really did me in were the interviews with Johnny Ramone, the universe rest his soul. Listening to him talk, I felt at times like I was watching the police-videotaped confessions of a hardened criminal. He was so cut off from his own humanity, so terrified to show the slightest bit of emotion or even admit that he had emotions.

The interviewer asked him about Joey's death. Johnny basically said that he was sad when it happened, but couldn't admit to caring about the guy. He just kept saying, "I don't know why I was sad. I really don't know." He even alluded to his feelings of sadness -- emotions --as "weakness." Damn, that fucker was so World War 2, it was almost endearing.

But then any good feeling quickly evaporated. The interviewer pressed him to elaborate, hinting that maybe, perhaps, the sadness could be due to the fact that Johnny, um, cared about Joey? and maybe that's why he was sad when Joey died?

Johnny's response: Negative. Joey's death affected him only because
1. Joey was a member of the Ramones, and
2. Johnny loved The Ramones. Therefore,
3. Johnny was sad at Joey's death. So basically, Johnny Ramone could only admit to loving an entity, not one of the human beings making up this entity, with whom he'd spent the majority of his life.

It was chilling. People have always talked about Dee Dee, because of his mortal drug addiction, and Joey, because of his O.C.D., being the big disasters of the group. But shit, the way he comes off in these interviews, Johnny looks like the biggest head-case of them all.

The man ran a great band. He had great organizational skills. He knew how to take control of a group of impossible people and make amazing things happen. No one can take anything away from what he's accomplished artistically.

But shit, as a human being? Look, I didn't know him. His attitude in these interviews may have been a conscious choice to do what he saw as the right thing in the given circumstances. But Christ, he comes off as way more of a cripple than Joey or even Dee Dee. The person that I saw in those interviews was a deformed human being, repugnant to watch. I felt like I was witnessing something I shouldn't be seeing, like watching someone being abused, or a gory accident.

But more than everything, I felt sad for Johnny Ramone. How does a person become so cut off his own self? How can you have reached the age of fifty-something, having experienced all the things he'd experienced, and still not be able to admit that you feel? That's like not being able to admit that you breathe or eat or go to the bathroom. It's just bizarre.

Johnny leaves a clue earlier on, where he admits to being a right-winger "ever since the age of ten." What ten-year-old becomes a right-winger? What ten-year-old knows what it even is to be a right-winger? Maybe a ten-year-old who's already lost a part of himself.

August 17, 2005 - Bollywood-on-the-Mediterranean
Went to the beach today. I love the beach. Two years ago, I would've never believed I'd be saying that 'cause I hated the beach when I lived in LA. I was exclusively a hill person. But the beach here, once you get out of the city, can be marvelous. If you go to the right places, there are wonderful towns with few tourists and no pervs (nude beaches are plentiful here) and the sand is clean and the water crystal-clear. Today it was cloudy and it even rained a little but it didn't matter. I went in the water anyway and it was warm and delicious, even without the help of urination.

Okay, I'll be honest: I still panic when I first go in the sea. It's just terrifying to me. Maybe it comes from being around cats for so long.

I'd brought a tuna sandwich and drank a can of San Miguel beer and ate potato chips in the sand. I stuck some potato chips inside the sandwich and read really bad news in the newspaper El Pais. Seventeen Spanish soldiers killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, car bombs in Baghdad kill 43, and Madonna falls off her horse, breaks her clavicle, and temporarily loses her fake British accent. Plus, in the same issue, there's a picture of J-Lo where she looks fat! The amount of senseless tragedy in today's paper is too much to bear, and I pass out for two hours.

I always take the train to the beach, which glides right alongside the coastline for a great view. There are sometimes buskers on the train -- but even more commonly, beggars. They are almost always gypsy women, sometimes with babies. They always give a whiny speech and sometimes they sing. This morning a gypsy woman got off the train with a baby and I noticed she was wearing a black screen-printed AC/DC t-shirt. She'd been on break when she was on my train, so no singing or speeches. I hadn't even noticed her 'til she exited the door in front of my seat. That t-shirt made me wonder, though: what's her schtick? I imagined her doing a gypsy-flavored version of Highway to Hell: "Livin' easy, livin' free, season ticket on a one-way ride!"

The gypsies orignally migrated from northwestern India. So the day had a funny symmetry when, on the train ride home, a young dude in a painstakingly stylish white dress shirt appeared on the train with a mic and portable amplification, turned the volume up to high hell, and began to sing. His voice, slathered with a ridiculous coating of reverb, turned the train car into a sensual echo chamber.

August 16, 2005 - L.A. Separation Dream?
Ugh, woke up this morning from a terrible nightmare that I'd paid Christopher Reeve all my life savings to do a cosmetic surgery on me. In this dream, Christopher Reeve was still paralyzed, but he was also a surgeon, though I knew for a fact that his specialty was in another, undetermined field, not plastic surgery. But I thought, "Well, he does know a lot about surgery."

Anyway, I woke up from the surgery and looked down at my exposed abdomen. I was slit from my pubes all the way up to my belly button. There was no blood, just two thick flaps of flesh crudely stitched together like those "Indian" wallets you made with pieces of leather and plastic lacing when you were a kid. That's when it hit me: "You dumbass! Why didn't you go to a real plastic surgeon? Just because Christopher Reeve is in a wheelchair doesn't mean he's a doctor!" But of course it was too late.

Another disturbing detail is that in the dream, I never knew exactly what procedure I went in for. But I knew that the gash in my belly was an undesired side effect, and I knew I would never look normal again. Devastated, I asked the nurses, "Why did Christopher Reeve do this to me? Don't plastic surgeons try not to leave horrible scars?"

"Well, you never specified anything else," they said.

And I thought, "Christ, they're right. I never once told Christopher Reeve not to do this to me!" On top of that, I realized that I'd totally been misinterpreting his TeeVee announcements to think that he was a high-profile doctor with a chain of successful clinics.

I realized right then that everything had been all my fault because of too much TeeVee and 100% carelessness on my part. Oh my Gawd, I just wanted to, like, disappear!